New doubts about Mexico's election / Judges who determined the outcome are not releasing details about recount

Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times

Published
4:00 am PDT, Saturday, September 9, 2006

2006-09-09 04:00:00 PDT Mexico City -- Top electoral officials and judges are feeding doubts about the outcome of Mexico's presidential vote by declining to release details about a recount of 4 million ballots and by moving quickly to destroy all 41 million ballots, legal experts said Friday.

The seven judges of the Federal Electoral Tribunal declared conservative candidate Felipe Calderon president-elect Tuesday. But the tribunal's 300-page ruling on the election left some experts shaking their heads.

John Ackerman, a professor of law at the National University of Mexico, said the judges had made no attempt to investigate improprieties in electoral financing and other charges made by losing leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. The ruling also failed to cite a single legal precedent in its rejection of a Lopez Obrador bid to have the election annulled, Ackerman said.

The court opened ballot boxes and recounted 4 million votes, but did so only to determine whether there was evidence of outright fraud -- and declared that it had found none. The actual tallies from the recount were not released to the public.

"The tribunal is explicitly preventing us from seeing what actually happened in the partial recount," Ackerman said. "The result of all this is that we don't have certainty about the election."

A spokesman for the Federal Electoral Tribunal said the judges would not comment on their ruling. He said no more information will be released on the recount.

On Thursday, the Federal Electoral Institute, known in Spanish by the acronym IFE, denied a request by Ackerman, the investigative magazine Proceso and others to have access to the ballots.

By law, ballots are destroyed after an election is certified as official. But the law does not stipulate when destruction should be carried out.

Irma Sandoval, director of the National University's Laboratory for the Study and Analysis of Corruption and Transparency in Mexico, said the request for the ballots was made through Mexico's fledgling public records act. That law grants access to any document not covered by privacy and national security restrictions.

"The IFE denied our request because they said the ballots are not documents," Sandoval said of the independent body charged with organizing Mexico's elections. "The ballots are printed by the government. But the IFE said that at the moment a citizen marks the ballot, it's no longer a document. It's a very metaphysical argument."

Sandoval said she and others requesting access to the ballots are considering filing an appeal to the Supreme Court to keep the IFE from destroying them.

The IFE's move to reject the request led Sandoval to compare this presidential election to 1988, when the government of Miguel de la Madrid burned ballots rather than allow a recount that might have proved leftist candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas' allegations of fraud.

"All of the reforms we've had since 1988 have been designed to bring the left back into the electoral process, and now the left is on the street," Sandoval said, referring to protests by Lopez Obrador's supporters. "If the IFE proceeds with the rushed and premature destruction of the ballots, then the comparisons to 1988 will be more than apt."

Lorenzo Cordova, a law professor at the National University, said that while the election was flawed in many ways, it was mostly a success. On election day, he said, all of the political parties praised the IFE's conduct of the election.